The US just switched on its biggest renewable project ever. More power than the Hoover Dam

Happy Friday. America's largest renewable energy project just came online in New Mexico and Arizona. It generates more power than the Hoover Dam and can power one million homes. We have the full story.

We also have a Paris museum whose dream is to empty itself, a rover that just ran a marathon on Mars, and the 120-year-old bridge that 200 Kansas Citians rebuilt into something extraordinary.

Have a wonderful weekend.

—Stephanie S

SunZia is now fully operational. A 3,650-megawatt wind farm in New Mexico feeds into a 550-mile high-voltage direct current transmission line carrying power to Arizona and across the western grid. At full capacity it can power one million American homes annually, generating more electricity than the Hoover Dam.

Pattern Energy broke ground in September 2023 and finished on time and on budget. Complexities included relocating mature saguaro cacti and large agave plants and supplying remote construction sites almost entirely by helicopter. More than 2,000 jobs were supported at peak construction, with over 100 permanent operations jobs created in New Mexico and Arizona.

The HVDC transmission system is one of the first major lines of its kind built in the US in a generation, moving large amounts of electricity efficiently across long distances from remote wind sites to population centers hundreds of miles away.

"SunZia proves that we can still build the consequential infrastructure this country needs," said CEO Hunter Armistead. "We did this the right way, on time and on budget, in genuine partnership with the communities who trusted us." Over 30 years, the project will invest more than $20 billion in New Mexico and Arizona. See the photos and read the full story.

During the Nazi occupation of Paris, over 100,000 items of cultural property were looted. Some 60,000 works were recovered after the war, 45,000 were returned to their rightful owners, and 15,000 went without identified owners. Most were sold by France in the early 1950s, except for 2,200 works entrusted to the care of various museums. The Musée d'Orsay holds 225 of them, and it has now opened a dedicated gallery to display a rotating selection and find the families they belong to.

The gallery is called "To Whom Do These Belong." Currently on display are 12 paintings including works by Renoir and Degas, and a sculpture by Rodin. Each work comes with what is known about it: when it was sold in France, where it went in the Third Reich, who painted it. The key part, who owned it, remains unknown for most. One exception is Edgar Degas's "Le Souper au Bal," which was owned by Jewish collector Fernand Ochsé, who was deported to Auschwitz and murdered. Whether any of his family survives and knows he owned it is unknown.

Over the last 30 years, 15 works held at the Musée d'Orsay have been returned to their rightful owners. The museum calls this an ongoing obligation. Works now identifiable throughout the museum carry special purple labels. Others are on long-term loan to French museums across the country. The goal of "To Whom Do These Belong" is to make the investigation as visible as possible. See the paintings and read the full story.

NASA's Perseverance rover has now covered 26.2 miles on the Martian surface, the distance of a marathon, over five extraordinary years of science. Landing in Jezero Crater in February 2021, it confirmed the crater was once filled with water by finding lake sediments at its base. It then drove up onto the ancient river delta, fired radar waves into the ground, and revealed horizontal sediment layers buried 65 feet below the surface, exactly the pattern left by lakes on Earth.

Along the way it captured video of a Martian solar eclipse with the tiny moon Phobos, summited the crater rim, and collected nearly 100 samples including some of the oldest volcanic rock ever found on another planet. Its carbonate-rich margin samples could be among the most scientifically significant ever gathered.

The samples are currently cached on the surface in sterilized sapphire tubes waiting for return to Earth. The original sample return mission saw costs rise to $11 billion, prompting NASA to solicit entirely new proposals. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has suggested that astronauts on a future crewed mission to Mars could simply pick them up by hand. Watch the time-lapse of the full journey and read the full story.

Mike Zeller was on a boat trip up the Kansas River when he passed an old railroad bridge and thought something should be done with it. Ten years later, he founded Flying Truss LLC, spent years pitching and begging and brainstorming, and eventually assembled what he calls a P6 approach: public, private, philanthropy, people, purpose, and process. Thirty-five local businesses donated materials and labor, including a legal firm that worked pro bono for seven years. The result is Rock Island Bridge, a fully renovated 120-year-old railroad crossing that opened in April as a restaurant, event space, and public walkway above the Kansas River.

The structural work was led by L.G. Barcus and Sons, the same contractor that raised the bridge's trusses in 1952. Those original steel trusses, built by Andrew Carnegie's steel firm, were found to be capable of supporting 3.16 million pounds. Almost nothing needed replacing beyond a few bolts and some rust treatment. The new additions, 15-foot cantilevers supporting a wrap-around deck, weigh about 680,000 pounds, well within the limits. The trusses occasionally plunge right through the walkway and even the restaurant tables, but that's the point.

The final cost was $20 million, funded 60% by private investment, 30% by public funding and grants, and 10% by philanthropic donations. Rock Island Bridge is free to enter and walk across. "A gift from about 200 Kansas Citians to our city," Zeller said, "that our kids and grandkids are going to enjoy." See the photos and read the full story.

☀️ Pakistan: In what analysts are calling one of the most rapid energy transitions in history, Pakistan installed 27 gigawatts of distributed solar in just two years, driven almost entirely by millions of households and businesses installing their own rooftop panels, eliminating daytime blackouts and avoiding $12 billion in oil and gas imports.

🧬 Global: University of Cambridge scientists have used base editing for the first time to study how human bodies form from embryos, discovering that a gene called NANOG is essential for an embryo to differentiate into the tissues that become a human being, revealing fundamental differences between human and mouse development with implications for understanding pregnancy loss.

📉 USA: For the second year in a row, deaths from alcohol, drugs, and suicide fell across America, with alcohol deaths down 4%, drug overdose deaths down 26%, and suicide deaths down 3% in 2024, driven by expanded access to naloxone, early intervention programs, and harm reduction strategies, with improvements seen across almost all demographic groups.

🧠 Global: Scientists at Johns Hopkins have discovered a tiny group of neurons in an ancient brainstem region that acts as a built-in focus filter, helping the brain automatically ignore distractions and zero in on what matters most, with mice becoming unusually distractible when the neurons were switched off and immediately regaining focus when they were reactivated.

🐚 Global: Scientists in Canada have discovered that detached tissue from a scarlet sea cucumber survived for more than three years in flowing natural seawater with no special nutrients, healing itself, dividing, and absorbing amino acids, in the first known case of discarded tissue surviving and growing long-term outside a controlled laboratory environment.

On June 26, 1997, Bloomsbury published the first Harry Potter novel in the United Kingdom. J.K. Rowling had written it as a single mother on welfare, in Edinburgh cafés during her daughter's naps. Twelve publishers had rejected it before Bloomsbury's eight-year-old daughter read the first chapter and demanded more. The book won most of the British children's book awards that year. By August 1999, it had reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list. It has since been translated into at least 73 languages and sold 120 million copies, making it the third best-selling book of all time.

Stephen King, reviewing it early, admired "the sort of playful details of which only British fantasists seem capable," noting that they work so well because Rowling enjoys "a quick giggle and then moves briskly forward." The series went on to span seven novels, eight films, a stage play, and a theme park empire, and introduced an entire generation to the specific joy of staying up too late because a book wouldn't let them put it down.

Other notable June 26 events:

1945: The United Nations Charter was signed by representatives of 50 countries at the San Francisco Opera House, 81 years ago today, following two months of debate among 3,500 delegates and observers from nations representing more than 80% of the world's population. President Truman called it "a solid structure upon which we can build a better world."

1963: President Kennedy stood before 450,000 people in West Berlin and declared "Ich bin ein Berliner," I am a Berliner, 63 years ago today, in one of the most powerful speeches of the Cold War, sending a direct message of solidarity to a city surrounded by communist East Germany.

2000: The first rough draft of the human genome map was unveiled, 26 years ago today, confirming that the DNA of any two individuals is 99.9% identical. It remains one of the most consequential scientific achievements in history.

2015: The US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the Constitution protects the right of same-sex couples to marry anywhere in the United States, 11 years ago today, in a decision that transformed millions of lives overnight.

— Abraham Lincoln

Every day brings amazing advances and uplifting moments that remind us just how wonderful the world can be. Here are five reasons why today is the best time ever to be alive:

🔬 Childhood Leukemia Is Survivable: Survival rates for childhood leukemia have risen from below 10% in the 1960s to over 90% today, driven by precision chemotherapy, targeted immunotherapies, and CAR T-cell treatments now achieving complete remission in cases that were previously untreatable.

🦁 Cheetahs Are Coming Back: After reaching a low of around 7,000 individuals globally, cheetah conservation programs combining anti-poaching enforcement and livestock protection schemes have stabilized populations in southern Africa, with India completing the first intercontinental cheetah translocation in history in 2022.

🧬 Type 2 Diabetes Can Be Reversed: Structured weight loss programs and metabolic surgery are achieving complete remission of type 2 diabetes in a significant proportion of patients, with some maintaining normal blood sugar without medication for over a decade, suggesting that a disease affecting 400 million people may often be reversible.

🐳 Whales Are Rebuilding the Ocean: As whale populations recover, scientists have discovered they play a far larger role in ocean carbon cycling than previously understood, with whale feces fertilizing phytoplankton blooms that absorb CO2, and whale carcasses sustaining deep-sea ecosystems for decades after death.

🔬 Reading Individual Cells: Single-cell sequencing can now read the genetic activity of individual cells within a tissue, revealing how cancers evolve resistance to treatment and what goes wrong at the cellular level in the earliest stages of disease, opening entirely new paths to diagnosis and prevention.

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